Social science approaches to understanding youth in Southeast Asia typically focus on youth and the state, youth and the family, and youth cultures. The rapid expansion of mobile telephony networks combined with the role of the mobile phone in performing youthful identities forces us to rethink our understanding of youth by attending to the influence of digital capitalism of mobile services providing companies.

In this presentation I discuss how mobile services providing companies contribute to the construction of youth by targeting (sub-groups of) young people in a particular way as distinct market segments. I combine this with material from ‘mobile history’ interviews with youth from Quang Tri province, Vietnam. This latter material sheds light on how young people navigate their mobile lives. Young people’s paths of access to mobiles, usage of mobiles and choice of SIM/network illuminates that understanding youth in contemporary Southeast Asia might be best approached in terms of various, intersecting networks that young people navigate in their everyday performance of being young and mobile. In doing so however, they solidify youth as a social location.